Reggie Quinerly grew up in Houston's Fourth Ward, the district that after emancipation was called Freedmantown and that in those years held the largest share of Black homeowners in the city. He was eight when he heard Lester Grant play drums at Pilgrim United Church of Christ, the church his family attended, and decided that was the instrument. Grant became his first mentor. A second Houston mentor, the percussionist Sam Dinkins, taught him early on, and Quinerly named a waltz for him nearly thirty years later. He entered Houston's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, the school that in roughly the same era turned out Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, Chris Dave, Eric Harland, Sebastian Whittaker, Mike Moreno and the bassist Alan Hampton, who would later co-produce Quinerly's second album.

He moved to New York at the end of the 1990s and took his bachelor's degree at the Mannes School of Music at New School University, where his drum teachers were Jimmy Cobb, Lewis Nash and Kenny Washington. Canopus, whose drums he endorses, adds Ralph Peterson Jr. to that list. He then went back to school for a master's in jazz studies at Juilliard. The teachers matter to the sound: Cobb, Nash and Washington are three of the most exacting timekeepers in the music, and none of them is a soloist's drummer. Quinerly took the lesson. Along the way he worked as a sideman with Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Joe Lovano, Von Freeman, Chico Freeman, Greg Osby, Christian McBride, Vincent Herring and Bob Stewart, and with the saxophonist Marcus Strickland he played and lectured for Jazz at Lincoln Center's Jazz in the Schools program. His own account of the venues runs from international festivals to Carnegie Hall and the Village Vanguard.

The leader career began late and on his own terms. Rather than shop for a label he started one, Redefinition Music, and put out Music Inspired by Freedmantown through it on September 18, 2012, shortly after finishing at Juilliard. It is a quintet record about the neighborhood he came from, with Tim Warfield on tenor, Mike Moreno on guitar, Gerald Clayton on piano and Vicente Archer on bass, plus Enoch Smith Jr. and the singer Sarah Elizabeth Charles on a track each. Every album since has been built the same way: one concept, mostly original material, a band assembled for that concept rather than a standing group, and no outside label.

Invictus followed on March 17, 2015, named for the William Ernest Henley poem of 1875 and produced by Quinerly with Alan Hampton, his Houston schoolmate, who also played bass on it. The band is a quintet with no horns: Warren Wolf on vibraphone, Yotam Silberstein on guitar, Christian Sands on piano, Hampton and Quinerly. Ten of the eleven pieces are his, the exception being an arrangement of "My Blue Heaven," and the record moves between post-bop writing, a solo piano feature for Sands on "Kunst Uberlebt," a guitar feature for Silberstein on "Variation 24," and three short tracks built on programmed hip-hop beats: "The Child of the 808" in both its interlude and full versions, and the closing "That Right There." One track, "Lester Grant," is named for the church drummer who started him. DownBeat's Frank Alkyer reviewed it as the record that made good on the debut's promise. Jazziz picked "My Blue Heaven" for its Summer 2015 subscriber disc.

Words to Love arrived on April 20, 2018 and is the outlier: eight songs with lyrics, sung by Milton Suggs and Melanie Charles, with Orrin Evans on piano, Ben Wolfe on bass and Jaleel Shaw's alto on selected tracks. One of the pieces is dedicated to his wife Toni and another was written with their daughter Harper Joy in mind. He returned to instrumental writing for New York Nowhere (March 12, 2021), a quintet date with Antoine Drye on trumpet, John Ellis on tenor, John Chin on piano and Sean Conly on bass, cast deliberately from pairs of players with long histories together. The title is a report on twenty-one years in the city, written after he had left it: Quinerly moved to Los Angeles in 2020. His own biography lists a doctorate from the University of Southern California, which no independent source confirms.

Los Angeles reshaped the catalog into two streams. The Connoisseur Series is a run of short piano-trio EPs, each with a different local rhythm section: Volume 1, released April 29, 2022, revisits five of his own earlier tunes with Adam Ledbetter and Trevor Ware; Volume 2 (April 2, 2025) is devoted to the New Orleans composer, arranger and producer Harold Battiste Jr., with Braxton Cook's alto added to a trio of Eric Reed and Mike Gurrola; Volume 3, Harlem Kings (January 28, 2026), plays James P. Johnson, Eubie Blake and Fats Waller with Reuben Allen and Johnathan Richards. The other stream is the full-length album. The Thousandth Scholar (January 19, 2024) is his first Afro-Cuban record, a quartet with the Havana-born pianist Manuel Valera arranging and co-producing, Matt Brewer on bass and the Bogota-born Samuel Torres on percussion, modelled on the drums-plus-hand-percussion quartets of Ahmad Jamal's Blue Moon and Herbie Hancock's Inventions and Dimensions. Seven of its eight pieces are Quinerly's, among them "Sam from Brooklyn" for Sam Dinkins and "Skain's Blues" for Wynton Marsalis, and the sixth track is Chick Corea's "Children's Song No. 10." He has taught at Juilliard since the fall of 2017 and at Hunter College since the summer of 2019, has written music curriculum for school districts in northern New Jersey since 2012, and has worked with Little Kids Rock since 2014.

Quinerly is a composer who plays drums rather than a drummer who writes, and the records are organised accordingly: eight to eleven short pieces, almost all his, arranged so the band has somewhere to go and the leader rarely takes a feature. Ken Micallef described the playing in DownBeat as spacious and streamlined, with a beautiful touch, and added that he swings very hard, which is the whole argument in one sentence. Nate Chinen in the New York Times called him a conscientious drummer with a nimble and approachable style. Bill Milkowski, reviewing New York Nowhere, put him with the old school, propelling the music from inside it rather than on top of it. That is what the Cobb, Nash and Washington apprenticeship produced. What separates him from a straight revivalist is the writing and the willingness to change the frame: a vibes-and-guitar quintet with no horns on Invictus, a full album of sung lyrics on Words to Love, a two-percussion Afro-Cuban quartet on The Thousandth Scholar, and programmed hip-hop beats dropped into an otherwise acoustic post-bop record without any fuss about it. The influences he names outside the drum lineage are Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Mary Lou Williams and Horace Silver, and the Silver in particular is audible in how tightly the tunes are built.